MEDIA
• "OK!, the celebrity magazine, could not possibly have purchased all the attention it enjoyed in late December after it got the scoop that Jamie Lynn Spears, the younger and until then less sensational sister of the troubled pop queen Britney Spears, was three months pregnant. Or could it?" [NYT]
• Josh Stein isn't actually leaving Gawker; Emily Gould will write for Jezebel; Choire Sicha will continue contributing columns; and recently departed Wonkette editor Ken Layne returned after just a few months off the job. Can anyone escape the tentacles of Nick Denton? [HuffPo]
• The Writers Guild plans to picket Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, and Conan O'Brien as the three late-night hosts return to the air. Letterman gets off easy since he struck a deal with the writers and may get a big boost since big stars (like Robin Williams, natch) won't have to cross the pickets to go on his show. [NYO, NYT]

MEDIA
• Is Jon Stewart really the only late-night host not currently covering the salaries of his laid-off, non-striking employees? [Mixed Media/Portfolio]
• The key lines from the n+1 essay that helped convinced Choire Sicha and Emily Gould to quit: "The purpose of Gawker Media was always to improve on the print publishing business model. It was never, as the content of Gawker sometimes seemed to suggest, to produce critiques of the waste that model created. The content at Gawker, like most Condé Nast titles, is a service to the advertisers. … You could say that as Gawker Media grew, from Gawker's success, Gawker outlived the conditions for its existence." Joshua David Stein announced his own departure, due mostly to personal loyalty, on Saturday. [n+1, Media Mob/NYO]
• Meanwhile, Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici proves that Condé and Gawker really are at the same level: "By the way, those who feel wronged by Gawker over the years can take some satisfaction in the uniquely terrible timing of the walkout for Denton, who is pumped full of painkillers after a recent back injury. Last week, the pain became so intense he needed an ambulance to get to the hospital. As he was being loaded into the ambulance, he says, his greatest fear was that he would be spotted by someone from Gawker, which is headquartered just down the block from his home." [Mixed Media/Portfolio]

Holy poop you guys, did you get that IM from the intern down the hall? Something totally crazy is going on at Gawker!! Writer Emily Gould and managing editor Choire Sicha, are QUITTING. Sicha is that hot gay who helped shape the site as its second solo editor from 2003 to 2005. He left to work at the Observer and then came back early this year. Gould has been working on the site since November of last year. Neither have jobs lined up, we hear. SO BRAVE. This certainly marks the end of an era for the site, which (as Vanessa Grigoriadis pointed out in her recent story in New York) has been making a shift toward an emphasis on comments and page views over edited content in recent months. It also comes on the heels of the departure of another Gawker mainstay, Alex Balk, who left for Radar magazine's Website recently. Perhaps more interesting, Gould and Sicha's departure puts today's Who's Quitting Gawker Media tally at four: Valleywag correspondent Megan McCarthy has also announced that she’s leaving the Silicon Valley blog for the warm corporate arms of Wired, while Jalopnik founding editor Mike Spinelli has removed himself from the blog's daily operations and is instead acting as editor-at-large, which he himself acknowledges is an "inflated" title. Obviously the timing of these departures is coincidental, but still.
What does this all mean? And more important, were you the first one of your friends to find out? And, wait, you commented, right? Wow, anyway, we have no idea what happens next. Who will they hire?
That sound you hear is the thumping of a thousand editorial assistants running to their apartment roofs to take a picture of themselves in a bathing suit.
A Long Dark Early Evening of the Soul With Keith Gessen [Gawker]
Related:Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass [NYM]
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